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Reasons for migrating from DB2: people, money and technology.
Posted by: Edwin DeSouza
Date: February 21, 2007 05:13PM

The reasons I have to migrate from DB2 focus on the simple fact that DB2 UDB can be a weak link in the datacenter. The three issues are simply: people, money and technology.

People.
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The lack of DB2/UDB experts is a fundamental problem. I?m referring to people who really have this database down cold. People who can implement best practices, set up optimal configurations, know DB2?s SQL dialect by heart. I think there are virtually no experts who are looking for full-time employment. I have talked to some consultants, but it?s very difficult to find qualified people who are looking for full-time work. If you have a solid DB2 UDB team in place this doesn?t matter that much. It seems that few organizations using DB2 have the staff in place to handle this database. IBM’s acquisition of Informix and short lived push to migrate customers from Informix to DB2 backfired and has left some customers with unsupportable DB2 environments.

MySQL is simpler to configure and manage, has a shorter learning curve, and and with the zealous community supporting MySQL, you can get answers to many questions in minutes. So, when you?re making the decision to grow the expertise you need in house (since it?s so difficult to hire), it?s so much easier with MySQL.

Money.
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Saving money on DB2/UDB support will actually show ROI in year 1, if you turn off 2 CPUs of DB2 and buy a one server MySQL Network Platinum support contract. MySQL Platinum (the highest service level) is about $5000 per server, not per processor. If you can get enough traction with MySQL and downsize DB2, this will lead to significant savings on a medium SMP machine.


Technology.
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MySQL core technology is reliable and solid as a rock, and is in use at many (tens of thousands) of places with diverse hardware, operating systems, applications and transaction rates. MySQL has a strong community helping the core developers build the product and they have a good reputation for quick turn around on bug fixes. MySQL supports a significant portion of the SQL standard, MySQL has replication, clustering, and very high performance. MySQL?s implementation of SPL is close enough to DB2?s implementation that the changes to stored procedures should be straightforward and mechanical. Also, datatypes should be close enough to make the schema changes mechanical. It?s likely that the application changes can be limited in nature. Also, i have not tested this extensively, but the SPL (Stored Procedure Language) used by MySQL is very similar with the DB2 SPL. Also, some of the compelling features of DB2 include support for gigantic multi-note federated databases. I’m not talking about migrating them. Moderate-sized single node databases are the candidates I’m talking about.


O.K., so with all that said, let?s stop reading blog entries and put together some migration plans.


http://zerolatency.com/?p=4

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Reasons for migrating from DB2: people, money and technology.
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